“Hello, my boy. I might have something for you.”

“Yes?”

“The Matchmaker.” He gave me an address in the Bronx.

“How did you find this out?”

“Targeted inquiry,” he said, as if that explained everything. “He’ll disappear if you bring a large police presence. We’ll go in quietly. And we must be ready for anything.”

“We? No, not we. Just me.”

Silence.

“Calvin?”

I repeated his name again but then realized he’d ended the call.

I stared at the phone.

Get there and dissuade him.

“What is it?” Christie asked.

“I think I need to go. Is that alright?”

“Of course. I’d feel guilty if I even tried to keep you here. I’ll bring your meal home.”

“We can pick this conversation up later. Truth. Lies. Love. The greatest gift.”

“Of course.”

After kissing her good-bye, I left the restaurant.

++++

Christie watched him go.

She hadn’t thought of the turtles or that polar bear cub in years, and now, the more she did, the more she realized that what Pat had said at first was probably true—sometimes a lie is a gift.

And her response felt true as well: Whether people forgive us or not, at times, keeping the truth from them might be the most powerful way to show our love for them.

Maybe Pat and Tessa didn’t need to know about the cancer after all. Maybe silence about her condition would be the best way for her to extend her love to them. What right did she have to steal their happiness from them by telling them such tragic news? Silence was a gift she could give, a gift they deserved. Whether they eventually forgave her or not wasn’t her main concern—whether or not she could serve them now, was.

++++

In the bathroom, Sasha put a finger down her throat and forced herself to vomit up whatever she’d been drugged with. Rinsing the taste of vomit out of her mouth was difficult, but she did the best she could before she left the restroom to meet with Blake again.

54

Timothy finished reading about Emily and, a bit self-consciously, accepted the applause of the audience at the bookstore.

They’d been entertained by Emily’s struggles.

By her pain.

Of course they had. That was what they’d come here to listen to: artfully chronicled accounts of suffering.

In one of the paradoxes of art, people only want to read books about characters who go through the kind of troubles they themselves would never want to experience in real life. Nobody wants to read a story in which everything goes right, and nobody wants to live a life in which everything goes wrong.